SAFE HARBOR BOOKS

Welcome! We are a small independent publisher of photography and fiction. We are located in Asheville, North Carolina, and distributed by Enfield Distribution of Enfield, New Hampshire, and to your local bookstore by Baker & Taylor. Our site is linked to Enfield's site for direct purchases.

Our interest is work by southern photographers or photographs focusing on the South as well as literary fiction (novels or novellas) by southern authors or narratives set in the South.

We are not interested in genre fiction, mysteries being the exception. Since our resources are limited and our list is full until 2018, please query before submitting any material. Our response may be slow.

Photography projects will require financial assistance from the photographer.

New Releases: 2017

by Christopher Brookhouse

171 Pages, $15.95 (paper)

Gus Salt never wanted to be sheriff of Harr County, North Carolina. He had planned to study with a famous writer at Harvard College and become a writer himself. Then Pearl Harbor happened, and Gus, deferred from service because of a lazy thyroid, was nearly the only able-bodied man available for law enforcement. Now, fourteen years later, a weary Gus is ready to retire. A new man is ready to take over, but first Gus must determine if the drowning of the local Episcopal minister was accidental, and if Blossom Hall, a young woman in love with Gus, had anything to with it. The old woman who appears and disappears, what does she know about Blossom? What does Blossom know about her? The past is about to catch up with everyone, Gus included.

Photographs by Michael Carlebach
Original poem “Some of Us” by Ann Lauterbach
Afterword “Two of Us” by Nathaniel Tripp

By turns wry and poignant, humorous and disturbing, Michael Carlebach’s stunning new collection of photographs offers a unique and timely vision of America. Some of Us presents people and places across the country caught like reflections in a quickly passed mirror that remind us who we really are and suggest where we might be going.

The late journalist Larry Mahoney wrote that Carlebach “has what an old colonel of mine liked to refer to as deep-serious gallows humor, something that soldiers have shared over the centuries.”

About Carlebach: “Few other people have been able to capture the beauty and quirkiness of the American culture, and on a grander scale, the folly and strangeness of the current stage of human evolution.” Travis Jennings, “Capturing Capacity.”

Carlebach’s first cousins, the poet Ann Lauterbach and writer Nathaniel Tripp, provide words that perfectly limn the images and help to explain the photographer himself, making the book a kind of family affair.

Photography

Photographs by John Rosenthal
Preface by Lolis Eric Elie
Afterword by John Pope

In the tenth year after Katrina, Safe Harbor Books is honored to publish John Rosenthal’s photographs of the Lower 9th Ward.

About his time there Mr. Rosenthal comments, “What I found and what I photographed wasn’t the remnants of a dangerous and dilapidated neighborhood now demolished by a hurricane, but the vestiges of a working-class community in which aspiration contended with scarcity, and where religious faith found expression on every block. From my perspective, the floodwaters had washed away not only bricks and mortar, but also the toxic stereotypes that separate us from each other. What was left, in other words, was the vanishing common ground, and it is this familiar terrain that I have photographed.”

“The power of these photographs is that you feel the human presence and its absence in every frame of Rosenthal’s work”
— Lolis Eric Elie, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

“Rosenthal’s superbly crafted poetic images are the works of a refined aesthetic sensibility which demands that beauty reveal itself in any subject.”
— Kate Dobbs Ariail, The Five Points Star

“Rosenthal’s photographs chronicle with timeless artistry a landscape ravaged by water and wind. We feel the loss of this vibrant community and bear its sorrow through an eerie brand of pictorial silence This is a beautiful book to be treasured.”
— David M. Spear, The Neugents, Visible Spirits, Ten Days in Havana

Photographs by Michael Carlebach

Sunny Land offers a unique view, both realistic and comic, of Miami and south Florida during the last decades of the 20th century, when political and social turmoil, urban decay, and suburban sprawl made Miami a curious amalgamation of glamour and violence, all of it bathed in sunlight. These black and white images portray a Florida left out of the tourist brochures, a place that is in some respects invisible, though no less compelling and meaningful.

Michael Carlebach photographed in south Florida for over three decades. His publications include The Origins of Photojournalism in America; American Photojournalism Comes of Age; Working Stiffs: Occupational Portraits in the Age of Tintypes; and Bain's New York: The City in News Pictures 1900-1925.

“Carlebach's work epitomizes the notion that the best documentary photography is also great art photography. The proof of the pudding is how memorable it is.”
— Rob Neufeld, Asheville Citizen-Times

Photographs by Elizabeth Matheson
Afterword by Catherine Bishir

“I never photograph anything I don't think is beautiful. Shell Castle is the most soulfully beautiful place I've ever seen.” —E.M.

Shell Castle, a late eighteenth-century plantation house in Halifax County, North Carolina, remained in the same family for two centuries. This book documents the plantation during the final days of Charles Whitaker, the last member of the family who built it. Additional photographs evidence the harm done by new owners. The text and photographs are complemented by Catherine Bishir's essay, which places Shell Castle and its inhabitants in their social and historical context.

Elizabeth Matheson is a native of Hillsborough, North Carolina. Her elegant photographs have been widely exhibited. In 2004 she received the North Carolina award for Excellence in the Arts.

Introduction by Georgann Eubanks

Quartet presents a sampling of the work of Rob Amberg, Elizabeth Matheson, John Rosenthal, and Caroline Vaughan. Their images, for the most part made in North Carolina, are both quiet and passionate, in time and outside of time, revealing both surface and depth.
Mr. Amberg documents life in rural southern communities. Ms. Vaugha's landscapes and portraits detail the increments and textures of time. Ms. Matheson's pictures present the architecture of formality that expresses the character of those who built and lived in such places as well as what is past and passing. Mr. Rosenthal's photographs freeze ordinary moments thereby allowing us to see in them what is extraordinary and permanent.

Photographs by Norman Seider

Judged BEST BOOK, 23rd Lopresti Art Publication Awards, 2007

“I think of my photographs as cinematic. I am a filmmaker creating silent movies in single frames. I see movement in each frame, a story ready to unfold, or the ghost of a moment just passed.”
—Norman Seider

“Norman Seider's work has a European and American sensibility. There are stories and ghosts with each image. His light is mysterious.”
—Jean Claude Lemagny, Director of Department of Photography, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris

“This is a book you take out to savor. The printing . . . of the book is stunning.”
—Tom Abrahamsson, Viewfinder

Norman Seider's films and photographs are in the permanent collection of major museums and collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Houston's Museum of Fine Arts; and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

Fiction

a novel by Christopher Brookhouse

122 pages, $12.95

Summer. 1960. Finn grew up in the South. He should have known when the school he worked for admitted a student of color there would be trouble. He should have known not to have an Indian for a friend. He should have known not to get involved with Annabel Spier. But he could not have known what he comes to know: how the secrets of the past shake loose one by one, and what he thought he knew he did not know.

“FINN is the real thing—a southern Gothic tale in which the narrator must solve the mystery of his own nature in order to escape the web of violence in which he is caught. Start it when you have time to finish because you won’t want to put it down.”
— Terry Roberts, author of A Short Time to Stay Here, winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction.

“In prose that is as rich and languorous as the summer that serves as the novel’s backdrop, Christopher Brookhouse brings readers a novel that is perfectly crafted, expertly paced, and, most importantly, very, very good.”
— Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home and This Dark Road to Mercy.

“A layered work, mottled and shifting like visions through antique glass, shadowed by ever lurking violence, as if written by a Southern-born Jim Harrison. A novel to be savored more than once, written with the same languorous, rumbling passion of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward's film The Long Hot Summer.”
— Kirkus Reviews

a novel by O. W. Hammond

170 pages, $5.00

James Knox, an aging book seller in a southern college town, confronts his past as he seeks peace and reconciliation in his present of diminishing possibilities.
James is not the writer he wanted to be, not the lover he thought he was, not the father he should have been, but he has the chance to be forgiven and to forgive.
Sex, love, betrayal, and luck are the themes here.

O. W. Hammond presently resides in Asheville, NC. Formerly he lived and worked in Chapel Hill, NC.
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by Christopher Brookhouse

Christopher Brookhouse is the author of numerous short stories, novellas, novels, and poetry. His early novel Running Out was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2005, Fog: The Jeffrey Stories (see below) won New Hampshire's biennial fiction award.

Three novellas that explore reticence and desire.
“Unless Alex” takes place on Valentine's Day years after the narrator has fallen in love with Alexandra (Alex) Kellogg. As the day passes, the narrator unfolds the story of their lives, from the autumn when Alex first kissed him and the summer when he turned away from the invitation of her nakedness to the years they have lived separate but connected lives. At the end of the evening, when Alex offers another invitation, the narrator knows that if he accepts he may lose her forever.
In “Affliction” reticence gives way to desire: Tony for Meredith, daughter of wealthy, self-absorbed Talbot Breed; Talbot for Janet, a painter whose art depicts the present but predicts the future; Crystal, one of Janet's subjects, for Janet; and Dr. Abernathy, a retired physician, for Meredith. As one might expect in a story suggested by Gabriel García Márquez's Of Love and Other Demons, there exists a sensuous psychological and tactile realism, mystery inspired by beauty.
“Loving Ryan” is a story of crime and spying told through the perspectives of several participants: Ryan, an American hired by the president of a Caribbean island nation to tutor his daughter, Isabel. Yvonne, Ryan's mother; Hugo, Isabel's father; Julia Katia, Hugo's wife; Chloe, Julia Katia's ally in forcing Hugo into exile; and the charming and precocious Isabel, who falls in love with Ryan. In exile, Ryan, the reticent tutor, becomes Hugo's devoted companion and caretaker.

“Reading these stories was a most gratifying experience.”
— Jerry Leath Mils, author of “The Dead Mule Rides Again,” and other pieces.

Published 2010, 200 pages, paperback, original price $19.95, now $5.00
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All of our materials are available for purchase through our distributor's website, Enfieldbooks.com. Alternatively, clicking the title of any of the above publications will take you directly to that item on the Enfield website.